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Obama’s Adventures in Africa

A recent United Nations report notes that U.S. military drone
flights over Somalia are now frequent enough to endanger local air
traffic. Calling Africa “the new frontier in terms of
counterterrorism and counternarcotics,” the Drug Enforcement
Administration has begun training paramilitary drug warrior teams
in Ghana, and plans to expand the program to Nigeria and Kenya.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is considering intervention
in the West African nation of Mali, where al Qaeda-inspired
Islamist rebels have seized territory in the North. The insurgents
are “a looming threat,” a Pentagon official claims, and “all
options are being considered.”

Four years ago, few would have predicted that one of President
Obama’s legacies would be increased militarization of U.S. policy
toward Africa — but that seems to be the case.

It’s not clear that our
expanded military presence in Africa serves any pressing U.S.
national security need.

For a while, one pet right-wing theory — concocted by
Dinesh D’Souza and embraced by GOP presidential contender Newt
Gingrich — was that “the anti-colonial ideology” of the
president’s Kenyan father drove everything Obama does. Dreams from
Obama’s absentee father made Barack Jr. “view America’s military as
an instrument of neocolonial occupation,” D’Souza imagined —
and so, “incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the
dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.”

Six months later, the model ran into a little trouble when Obama
began raining Tomahawk missiles down on the North African country
of Libya. What, one wonders, would a genuine Afrocentric
anti-colonialist think of new drone bases in Ethiopia and Djibouti,
spy plane flights from a dozen installations throughout Africa or
the president’s decision to deploy U.S. special forces to Central
Africa to help hunt down the bizarre death-cult known as the Lord’s
Resistance Army? Would Obama Sr. look fondly on U.S. Africa
Command’s “mission” to “provide a security environment conducive to
good governance and development”?

Probably not. Perhaps, instead of crackpot theories about
Obama’s alleged “daddy issues,” we can look to bureaucratic mission
creep as the sounder explanation for the president’s behavior.

Last summer, in his first public comments after moving from
Langley to the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted that
al Qaeda’s defeat was “within reach.” When we kill or round up some
10 to 20 remaining senior operatives, Panetta said, we’ll “really
cripple al Qaeda as a threat to this country.”

On the home front, this allegedly “existential threat” hasn’t
managed to set off a single bomb in the U.S. in 10 years. AQ
appears pretty well crippled at this point.

Still, the War on Terror goes on and expands. How great a threat
to the U.S. are Al Shabab, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko
Haram, and the other groups we’re surveilling or targeting? In
June, the Washington Post reported that some State Department
officials worried about military mission creep: “They have argued
that most terrorist cells in Africa are pursuing local aims, not
global ones, and do not present a direct threat to the United
States.” In our expanded drone war, one former national security
official comments: “What’s happening is that we’re using the
technology to target people we never would have bothered to
capture.”

Promiscuous war-making leads to unintended consequences. For
example, U.S. intervention in Libya stoked the civil war in Mali,
as Tuaregs serving in Gadhafi’s army joined the fight after the
dictator’s fall.

It’s not clear that our expanded military presence in Africa
serves any pressing U.S. national security need. But interventions
have a way of generating their own justifications. Before long,
“blowback” from African adventurism may generate new crises for
this or a future administration to solve.